I keep a full, current copy of each site here at all times, except for very rencent forums and very recent changes to ad-rotation script. The copy (including static HTML pages) is saved to CD every two weeks.

Backup of forums and changes to ad-rotation:

Downloaded to local machine (and added to full site copy, incluing static HTML pages) burned to CD every two weeks.

CD backups are currently kept on site, although I think that I should get a bank safe-deposit box soon (and maybe have a friend keep a copy at their house) in case of fire, etc.

My hosting company backs up customer data on our shared servers daily to a backup hard drive. Each of our shared servers has two hard drives, and does a back up during off hours. It seems to me that most hosting customers think that their host backs up their sites, but don't really know their host's policy on the subject. I still recommend customers to keep their own backups. Our backup drive does protect them in the case of a primary drive failure, but it doesn't protect them from a catastropic event that would destroy our servers, like a fire.

Only when I make major updates to the database, do I manually do a dump. Thank God I do that.

Once I was testing a pretty new gadget that I thought my members would really appreciate. But it ended up deleting them and all their preferences. Yet like superhero, I was able to restore them to their former glory - from the dump.

I was sitting around today thinking about the wonderful power outages in NY (not that I was anywhere near them) when I got an email from my host talking about how their server was up but varrious peers were down, etc... Of course that got me thinking... if my site went down and the data was lost, what would it take to rebuild? Sure I've got all the files for all my sites... all the images, scripts, etc... but the database info wasn't backed up anywhere. Needless to say I'm going to be backing it up far more often now!

We do an incremental backup of all our servers on a daily basis. The files are backed up to a remote server for redundancy. Since this backup does not include Windows permisssions, we also run a scheduled windows backup job every night.